Foster Energy

I had already typed an entire article and, due to my stupidity and clumsy, fat fingers, I hit the wrong button and lost everything. Dick, my web-site associate and long-time friend, doesn’t make these kinds of errors, or if he does, he finds ways to correct them. That is why, for the site’s heavy-lifting, he takes the recorded interview and spends hours listening carefully to the recorded interview and presenting it in a readable, literate, entertaining manner. I must admit that I make his job much more difficult than it needs to be. You see, we have a list of questions that we ask our interviewees, and it makes his job much, much easier if we can just do the basic questions and answers. Usually, however, something happens during the interview, something one of us said and I cannot resist commenting on it and…away we go into “Obscurityland” and begin talking about things that may not be relevant. I need write my questions and comments down and then shut up, finish the interview, and then make any comments that I the feel urge to make.

Darren Talley, Chelan High School’s head coach and weekly contributor to our web site, contacted us about a class guy we might want to interview. Since I consider Coach Tally to be the epitome of class in the high school football coaching ranks, his recommendation carries a lot of weight. He wasn’t wrong. We drove south to Tukwila and Foster High School (Dick driving from Bellingham and I from south Everett), met with Coach Jim Sutrick and started the interview. We learned first how the two coaches met. It seems that Coach Sutrick saw that he had an open date on his calendar, so he set about looking for a possible opponent. He contacted Coach Talley, and as Dick’s previous column states, a friendship based on mutual admiration was born.The interview went remarkably well (except for the meandering and randomness), because of the subject. Jim Sutrick has been the head football coach for four years at Foster High School in Tukwila, Washington, and he has experienced a degree of success, going 7-3 in the 2010 and doing so under conditions that are much less than ideal. Foster is the smallest school in the Seamount League, and is the most diverse in a league that, in itself, is mostly very diverse. Foster is actually the most diverse school in the entire nation with a student-body that is 22.2% African/African-American; 26.5% Asian; 22.5% Hispanic; 25% Caucasian (according to Wikepedia). What does all this mean? It means that for a coach to sell the game to kids (and most coaches find it necessary to sell the game to kids who grew up with no understanding of the game of American football) you have to forge a connection and approach it with a lot of energy. Foster High School has embraced students from approximately forty-five countries and speaking sixty-nine languages. That means that the number of ELL (English Language Learners) is inordinately high. Teaching the game of football to students who have grown up watching their high school, college, and professional heroes play the game and understand it and its basic terminology is difficult enough. Teaching it to ELL kids increases the difficulty quotient. Added to that is the very real fact that many of his players must work part-time to help support their families. And, add to that the omnipresent private school, in this case Kennedy Catholic, siphoning off some of the better prospects, and you have the potential of some nightmare seasons. However, Sutrick’s teams are always competitive. And, for that he can point to himself as an important reason.

Coach Sutrick is one of the most passionate coaches I have ever met. His energy almost crackles in the air surrounding him. It is easy to see what prompted Coach Talley to contact us. When he took over the Foster program, he looked through the equipment and found that the game uniforms were in terrible shape, so he launched fund-raisers to buy the uniforms. He couldn’t buy them all in the same year, so he bought home game uniforms one year, had another series of fund-raisers and bought the uniforms for away games the next year. His next goal is to work on his weight room. He told us the room was small and in sad shape. When he gave us a tour, we had to agree. It looked dangerous. I’ve taught weight-training in a junior high school and had the opportunity to design the weight room. That weight room was easily two to three times as big as Foster’s and had more equipment. The school needs to step up and solve the problem, and it is a problem.

Another problem is that Foster is located in a place that has pockets of wealth surrounded by some of the most low-income areas in Washington State. One of the determiners of this is the number of students who are on free or reduced lunches. At Foster the number is 70%. That is the highest I have seen in the schools we have dealt with. It is near Southcenter and has that business center as part of its tax base, but little, if any, of that tax money trickles down to Foster High School. Why is that? You’ll have to ask the politicians. Unfortunately, people who are new to this country seldom feel able to do that. Chelan’s free and reduced lunch percentage is quite high as well, so maybe Darren and Jim found that they had a lot more in common than just a football game. And speaking of the game, neither of the coaches mentioned the score, which might mean that sometimes a football game is simply that, a game to be played and enjoyed for its own sake.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the school’s improvement in the state’s standardized tests. In one year the school jumped from from 52.8% in reading to 80%; 19.4% in math to 41.7%; 70.2% in writing to 80%; 15.4 in science to 44.8%. That is an amazing job by students, teachers, and administration. Now, if the school could just show a little love to the football program…?

Coach Jim Sutrick and Foster High School will be a force to be reckoned with for years. He has numbers out, over 50 players last year, according to the roster, and those numbers will continue to grow. One thing is certain, he will be attacking any challenges that arise with passion. And, he will solve them. Jim Olsen